Battery Tips

Take care of your battery and keep it clean.
I should probably say this twice, but I won’t. Taking care of your laptop battery is crucial to its performance. Over time the metal contacts on the battery will build up gunk that can cause the battery to work harder than it should in its daily operation. So once a month, pull out the battery and wipe it down with a cloth, clean off the contacts and you will extend its life.

Don’t allow your battery to discharge completely.
Allowing a battery to completely discharge can have very negative effects on the overall performance and life of the battery. Often times we find that by draining the battery can in some cases cause complete battery failure or drastically shorten the charge capacity of the battery. What this means in plain English is your battery will die and/or not hold as much of a charge therefor draining quicker than it should.

Many manufacturers recommend that your battery is stored and maintained at around half or 40% charge to maintain optimal performance. Always read the user manual that came with your laptop, or if it is a replacement battery read the included documentation.

Add more memory or RAM to your laptop.
Many people would speculate that this method will not help to save battery performance due to the fact that more memory requires more power to maintain. While this reasoning is true in part, if your laptop is short on RAM, your hard drive will be constantly running to make up the difference, via your swapping file, which in turn would use a lot more power and battery life. If you are using a laptop that has say 512mb of RAM, increasing this to 1gb should be more than enough to maintain optimal performance.

Turn off your Wifi while not in use.
There is usually a switch to turn off your Wifi, however you may need to turn it off in the Wifi configuration panel. Your Wifi uses a lot of power when it is not connected because it is constantly searching for a connection, so it is a good idea to make sure it is turned off when not in use.

Remove your battery while running your laptop on AC.
If you are working from home and your laptop is plugged in to the AC, removing your battery is a good habit to have. Keep in mind that you do not want to store your battery completely discharged, but this method will allow your laptop battery to take a break while not in use.

Lower your graphics use.
You can save a lot of power consumption by dimming your screen, lowering the screen resolution and removing the fancy graphics. Windows especially uses a lot of graphics on the menu’s and such, which is easily turned off and cut out a lot of the battery drain. The overall look may not be as pretty, but were going for battery life here.

Set your laptop to Hibernate rather than Standby mode while sitting idle.
While stand-by mode is great for saving on power consumption, setting your laptop to hibernate will allow the computer to completely shut itself down and still save your laptops state where you left off. Both options are good, you should at least be doing one of them, but hibernation will be the most effective.

Keep your laptops air vents clean.
Laptops, or computers in general operate more efficiently when running at cooler temperatures. This is also why you see high end computers with water cooling systems. Anyways, by keeping the air vents clean you allow more air flow for the fans to run and the laptop will remain considerably cooler.

Remove USB devices when not in use.
USB devices often require a good amount of power to continue running. If you are not using them make sure to remove them from the computer and this will help to save on battery consumption.

Defragment your hard drive regularly.
Defragmenting your hard drive can help it to run more efficiently and require less power consumption. The more efficiently your hard drive operates the less work it will require to maintain operation. So keeping this in order and defragmenting regularly will benefit the life of your laptops battery.

Optimal laptop performance causes optimal battery performance.
Overall, the better your laptop performs the longer your laptop battery will last. It is very disruptive to your day when your laptop battery dies and you are constantly looking for a good place to plug in. So use the tips above to maintain your laptops battery at peak performance and life on the go should be a little easier.